Blender 'command line', interface idea.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Well, I have switched to Vim as my main text editor. One good thing that I can say about it, The complete absence of buttons or menus saves a LOT of screen space. Then I thought, what if this was integrated into blender, as it already has a lot of Vi like features. such as almost no key-chords and the ability to type in numbers after commands.

What about having a command line in place of the menu-based window header i.e. type ‘: bi<enter>’ to hide/show the background image panel. On top of that, it would be possible to move almost everything in the ‘model’ panel (except the modifier stack) and everything in the render panel to be commands; saving a lot of screen space.

#2

what editor did you use before?
i’m using kate because it handles remote files quite nicely. menus and buttons are hidden.
vim i use when i’m doing editing on the server, through ssh. but i’ve noticed that after trying out kate couple of times i just didn’t want to go back to vim … had to swallow my bride and start using graphical editor… sigh… :slight_smile:

about the blender feature. this has been discussed couple of times here… but there was no developer interested…

.b

#3

Gedit->geany->Vim->?

about the blender feature. this has been discussed couple of times here… but there was no developer interested…

I wasn’t aware that it had bean discussed already, What was the reaction from the community? positive/negative? I might look into it myself… that is if i ever manage to find my way around blender source code… and after the 2.5 redesign.

#4

I think this feature is not possible before the event system rewrite. Is there any information on the rewrite now? Anything been decided?

#5

This is how AutoCAD worked way back when I learned it in 1991. Command line at the bottom of the drawing window. I don’t think that’s a good workflow to return to.

#6

good way to write macros and little helper scripts though. run through your sequence of steps in GUI mode, then copy/paste the relevant code from the console to your script editor. very handy feature of maya, would be awesome to see it in blender.

#7

Couldn’t you use the Interactive Python Console script for something along these lines?

#8

I agree,This is how it worked when I learned it in school a few years ago, well, actuallyit was a little more advanced, but the root of it was that command line. Maybe if it had autocomplete and suggestions it would be usable, but without those I think hotkeys are a lot more efficient. And you don’t have to press enter all the time.

#9

tab complete is obviously essential for a productive CLI, and making the commands as short as possible. Actually, my main complaint is that the menus take up too much room on the window headder, this would be solved by a CLI because they take up the same amount of screen space, regardless of how many commands there are.

#10

I’m not wrong Rhino use the same principle of AutoCAD in this matter.

Sincerely, I love it. It’s very fast to work with. You can configure the keys so you don’t need to write the full command of your most used tools (e.g. l = line, c = copy, …)